From the History of Punishment
| felons; offender; beheading; adultery; pillory; punishment; execution; deliberately; condemned; ancient; medieval; guilty; legal; public |
For the most history ____1____ has been both painful and _____2_____ in order to act as deterrent to others. Physical punishments and public humiliations were social events and carried out in most accessible parts of towns, often on market days when the greater part of the population were present. Justice had to be seen to be done.
One of the most bizarre methods of ______3______ was inflicted in ancient Rome on people found ______4______ of murdering their fathers. Their punishment was to be put in a sack with a rooster, a viper, and a dog, then drowned along with the three animals.
In ______5______ Greece the custom of allowing a ______6_____ man to end his own life by poison was extended only to full citizens. The philosopher Socrates died in this way. Condemned slaves were beaten to death instead. Stoning was the ancient method of punishment for ______7______ among other crimes.
In Turkey if a butcher was found guilty of selling bad meat, he was tied to a post with a piece of stinking meat fixed under his nose, or a baker having sold short weight bread could be nailed to his door by his ear.
One of the most common punishments for petty offences was the ______8_______, which stood in the main square of towns. The ______9______ was locked by hands and head into the device and made to stand sometimes for days, while crowds jeered and pelted the offender with rotten vegetables or worse.
In ____10____ Europe some methods of execution were ____11____ drawn out to inflict maximum suffering. ______12______ were tied to a heavy wheel and rolled around the streets until they were crushed to death. Others were strangled, very slowly. One of the most terrible punishments was hanging and quartering. The victim was hanged, beheaded and the body cut into four pieces. It remained a _____13______ method of punishment in Britain until 1814. ______14______ was normally reserved for those of high rank. In England a block and axe was the common method but this was different from France and Germany where the victim kneeled and the head was taken off with a swing of the sword.
| TRANSLATE THE FOLLOWING: Joseph Ignace Guillotin A doctor and member of the French Legislative Assembly, he suggested the use of the guillotine for executions in 1789. A physician and humanitarian, Guillotine was disturbed by vulgarity of public executions and petitioned for a single method of capital punishment to be used for all crimes demanding the death sentence. The guillotine consists of a heavy blade with a diagonal edge, which falls between two upright posts to cut off the victim's head cleanly and quickly. Similar machines had been used in various other countries including Scotland and Italy. The main idea was to make execution as quick and painless as possible. The first person executed by guillotine was the highwayman Pelletier in 1792, but the machine came into its own in 1793, during the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, when aristocrats were guillotined by the hundred. The device was nicknamed 'Madame Guillotine' after its sponsor. Charles Lynch Captain Charles Lynch, of Virginia, author of the infamous lynch law, will forever be linked with 'vigilante justice'. Lynch decided that he and his neighbours were too far from lawmakers and sheriffs to punish properly the vandals and robbers terrorizing the rural area. He encouraged the fellow citizens to sign a declaration he drafted, announcing the intention to 'take matters in their own hands'. "If they (criminals) do not desist from their evil practices, we will inflict such corporal punishment on them, as to us shall seem adequate to the crime committed or the damage sustained." Although the death penalty was not always exacted, in most cases the punishment turned out to be hanging. In addition to the fact that many innocent victims suffered lynching, a certain amount of guilt among the lynchers can be ascertained by the very technique for hanging criminals. Lynch and his cohorts practiced a form of passive hanging. A rope was tied around a tree and the condemned man placed on a horse with the other side of the rope strung snugly around his neck So the criminal was killed not by the captors tightening the noose, but the whim of the horse. When the horse moved far enough away from the tree, the rope choked the horseman. |
UNIT 14. THE PURPOSE OF STATE PUNISHMENT
Exercise 1: Explain the meaning of the words and expressions from the box. Complete the following text using these words and expressions:
| wrongdoer; misdeeds; deterrent; retribution; death penalty; corporal punishment; rehabilitate; reform; barbaric; law-abiding; humane; crime doesn't pay |
What is the purpose of punishment? One purpose is obviously to ______1________ the offender, to correct the offender's moral attitudes and anti-social behaviour and to ______2_______ him or her, which means to assist the offender to return to normal life as a useful member of the community.
Punishment can also be seen as a ______3_______ because it warns other people of what will happen if they are tempted to break the law and prevents them from doing so. However, the third purpose of punishment lies, perhaps, in society's desire for _____4______, which basically means revenge. In other words, don't we feel that a _____5________ should suffer for his ______6_______?
The form of punishment should also be considered. On the one hand, some believe that we should "make the punishment fit the crime". Those who steal from others should be deprived of their own property to ensure that criminals are left in no doubt that _____7_____ ________ _________. For those who attack others _____8_____ __________ should be used. Murderers should be subject to the principle "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" and automatically receive
the ______9_______.
On the other hand, it is said that such views are unreasonable, cruel and ____10______ and that we should show a more ______11_____ attitude to punishment and try to understand why a person commits a crime and how society has failed to enable him to live a respectable, _____12______ life.
Text 1: Match the following headings with the sections of the text below:
Rehabilitative programs